Here are the answers to some common questions about Axios Review:
Q. Will you help me get my paper ready for submission to a journal?
A. Our service essentially is the first round of peer review, and your paper will have a rough time with the reviewers if it isn’t ready. We recommend that you ask your colleagues for comments before you submit to us.
Q. Who do think is going to use your service?
A. The short answer: anyone who wants to minimize the risk associated with the review process, people frustrated with rejections on scope or novelty, or anyone who wants to aim high with their work but avoid a chain of rejections. Who specifically? Students who have finished and want to get their thesis chapters out, but are just about to change labs and start new projects. PI’s who need to get papers into good journals before a grant deadline, and cannot risk a long review process or multiple rejections. Postdocs juggling many projects who need to get publications without major hassle. With Axios Review, these people should find the right journal for their paper with (typically) two or fewer rounds of external assessment.
Q. I have a good feel for where my work should get submitted, so why should I pay for your service?
A. Most researchers are good judges of where their paper should go, but every submission risks being rejected. Our review service simultaneously evaluates the fit of your paper to an array of journals, allowing you to aim high with the top choice and play safe further down the list.
Q. The journals on my target list are not in your list of participating journals. Can I still use Axios Review?
A. We are happy to refer your paper to any journal that regularly carries ecology or evolution research – if the journal hasn’t received a previous referral from us we’ll approach them while your paper is in review.
Q. What are Axios Review coupons?
A. We give our editors and reviewers an in kind payment for helping us, in the form of a discount for using our service. To keep track of these we give out hexadecimal coupon numbers. If you’ve got a coupon number, please provide it when you submit.
Q. Can I pay the fee from my grant?
A. Our fee ($250) should be an eligible expense as a ‘publication cost’, although most funding agencies leave it up to individual departments to decide. We recommend checking with your finance office.
Q. What happens if the reviewers ask for major revisions? Won’t that make the journal reluctant to invite submission?
A. If the reviewers have identified a potentially serious problem we ask the authors to revise their paper. If the editor is satisfied that the new version has addressed the problem, they will explicitly state this in the referral letter for the journal. Alternatively, authors can decide to opt out of the referral stage and just use our reviews to improve their paper prior to submitting directly to a journal.
Q. Will my paper go through peer review again once it gets submitted to the journal?
A. Journals certainly can choose to send the paper back out for review. They may use the same reviewers from the Axios round of review, or they may find new people. It’s also possible that they feel the paper has been successfully revised and can be accepted straight away.
Q. Why should I send my paper to you when it will probably go back out for review at the journal?
A. Some papers need two rounds of review, this could either be one round at Axios and one round at the journal, or two rounds at the journal. Top tier ecology or evolution journals typically reject over 70% of their direct submissions. Having your first round of review with Axios means that you only submit to a journal that wants your paper, eliminating rejections on grounds of scope and cutting the chances of rejection on grounds of quality. We significantly increase the chances your paper will be accepted at one of the journals on your target list, and we achieve this in a single step.
Q. What if journals refuse the referral just because I’ve put a rival journal higher on my target list?
A. We only include comments related to that journal in our referral, so they are unaware of the other journals on your list.
Q. Can I submit to other places as well as Axios Review?
A. No - this would be akin to duplicate submission. However, once we’ve completed the referral process, you’re free to submit the paper wherever you like.
Q. Will you be paying reviewers?
A. No. There’s a few good reasons for this. First, any money we pay reviewers will have to be added to the submission fee. If we gave each reviewer $100 for their comments, the fee would jump to at least $450. If the reviewer later decides to send their own paper to Axios, they’ll essentially return the $100 (plus $200 more) and we’d transfer it to their reviewers. This notional $100 would just go round and round the community, and the main beneficiary would be whoever collects the transaction fees. Second, is a review really worth $100? A leading expert in some areas of law can charge over $1000 per hour. Why should an academic with unrivalled expertise get any less? If we switch to full monetary compensation for reviewers, the current system would be bankrupt in days. We are often amazed by the diligence and insight of people who review, so reviewers will receive a $50 discount for submitting to Axios when they complete their review. To enable broader recognition of their efforts, we will be releasing a ‘top reviewer list’, much like the equivalent at Molecular Ecology.
Q. Do you pay your editors?
A. No - as with reviewers, our editors are ‘paid in kind’, in that they receive one free submission to Axios for every ten papers they handle.
Q. Why should I pay you for peer review when I get it for free at the journal?
A. The consensus is that a round of peer review costs about $300, and that’s either paid by libraries (subscription journals) or by authors (Open Access journals). In either case, the journal is also incurring the expense of reviewing papers it rejects, and these are passed along to the library or author as well. With Axios you’re paying for a single round of review, and we then find a journal that’s interested in your paper. Journals don’t have to review papers they don’t want, and authors don’t submit to journals that don’t want their paper. What do we do with the fee? The majority pays our wages and allows us to devote our full attention to handling your paper. The rest goes on things like peripherals, IT, travel, and other expenses.
Q. Why are you a for-profit company?
A. Independent peer review is a new idea, and, as with any exploration of a new territory, we need to be able to make quick decisions. The hands-down best corporate structure for doing that is a for-profit. Non-profits (at least here in British Columbia) involve a lot more people and a more complicated decision making process. There is a hybrid corporate structure here in BC called a Community Contribution Corporation, which has a cap on dividends and restrictions on asset sales, but retains the flexibility of a for-profit. The legislation is very new (from mid 2013) and still untested, but once the dust has settled this is an option we’ll very likely pursue. More broadly, we’re not here to make a big profit - our fee covers the basics and not a lot else.